Understanding Azure Disk Storage Options

Azure offers three types of disk storage: Managed Disks, Unmanaged Disks, and Ultra Disks.

Managed Disks are the most popular choice, as they provide high availability and are easier to manage. They're also more secure, with features like encryption and backup.

Unmanaged Disks, on the other hand, require more manual management and are less secure. However, they're also cheaper than Managed Disks.

Ultra Disks are a premium option, offering high-performance storage with low latency. They're ideal for applications that require high I/O throughput.

Managed disks offer a lot of flexibility and scalability, allowing you to easily scale up or down as needed.

One of the key benefits of managed disks is that they provide you with a high level of control over your data, letting you manage and configure your disks to meet your specific needs.

By using managed disks, you can simplify your storage infrastructure and reduce the complexity of managing your own disks.

Azure offers a wide range of services that cater to various needs, from compute and storage to databases and artificial intelligence. These services are categorized into different sections, making it easier to find what you need.

Azure Compute includes Virtual Machines, Virtual Machine Scale Sets, Functions for serverless computing, and more, allowing you to build and deploy cloud-based apps and APIs.

Azure Storage includes Blob, Queue, File, and Disk Storage, as well as a Data Lake Store, Backup, and Site Recovery, which provides a robust storage solution for your data.

Azure Databases includes several SQL-based databases and related tools, making it easy to manage and analyze your data.

Azure AI + Cognitive Services includes Computer Vision API, Face API, Bing Web Search, Video Indexer, and Language Understanding Intelligent, which enables you to develop applications with artificial intelligence capabilities.

Azure Internet of Things includes IoT Hub and IoT Edge services, which can be combined with machine learning, analytics, and communications services to create intelligent IoT solutions.

Azure Security + Identity includes Security Center, Azure Active Directory, Key Vault, and Multi-Factor Authentication Services, ensuring the security and identity management of your Azure resources.

Here's a brief overview of the main Azure services and their categories:

Azure Disk Services offers a feature called disk reservation, which provides a discount on the advance purchase of one year's disk storage, reducing your total cost.

You can purchase a disk reservation for a specific disk SKU in a target region, such as five P30 (1 TiB) Premium SSDs in the Central US region for a one year term.

The disk reservation experience is similar to Azure reserved VM instances, allowing you to bundle VM and Disk reservations to maximize your savings.

Azure Disks Reservation currently offers a one year commitment plan for Premium SSD SKUs from P30 (1 TiB) to P80 (32 TiB) in all production regions.

For more information about reserved disks pricing, check out the Azure Disks pricing page.

Azure's VHD upload capability has made it much easier to transfer on-premises VMs to the cloud. Now, you can upload VMs to large managed disks directly, without the need for extra steps.

Direct upload allows you to transfer VHDs up to 32 TiB in size, which is a significant improvement. This means you can upload larger disks without any issues.

The previous process involved staging your data in a storage account, but that's no longer necessary. This simplification has made the backup and restore process much easier.

Reducing costs is also a major benefit of direct upload. By uploading data to managed disks without attaching them to VMs, you can save money.

Azure Disk offers five disk types, each suited for specific workloads. Ultra Disk is ideal for IO-intensive workloads like SAP HANA and top-tier databases.

The other four disk types are: Premium SSD v2, Premium SSD, Standard SSD, and Standard HDD. Premium SSD v2 is a more flexible option that doesn't have dedicated sizes, allowing for granular adjustments to performance without downtime.

Here's a comparison of the five disk types:

*Only applies to disks with performance plus (preview) enabled.

If you're looking for a disk type that can handle IO-intensive workloads, Ultra Disk is the way to go. It's specifically designed for workloads like SAP HANA and top-tier databases.

Ultra Disk stands out from the rest with its impressive specs: up to 65,536 GiB in size, 10,000 MB/s in max throughput, and 400,000 IOPS.

But what about production and performance-sensitive workloads? That's where Premium SSD v2 comes in. It's perfect for scenarios that require low latency and high IOPS and throughput.

Here's a comparison of the five disk types:

Premium SSD v2 is a great option for production and performance-sensitive workloads, but it doesn't have dedicated sizes like Premium SSD does. This means you can set Premium SSD v2 to any supported size you prefer and adjust its performance without downtime.

Images and snapshots are two distinct concepts in managed disks, and understanding the difference between them is crucial for efficient storage management.

A snapshot is a read-only, crash-consistent full copy of a managed disk that's stored as a standard managed disk by default. With snapshots, you can back up your managed disks at any point in time, and they exist independently of the source disk.

You can use snapshots to create new managed disks, and they're billed based on the used size. For example, if you create a snapshot of a managed disk with provisioned capacity of 64 GiB and an actual used data size of 10 GiB, that snapshot is billed only for the used data size of 10 GiB.

On the other hand, an image contains all managed disks associated with a VM, including both the OS and data disks. You can create an image from your custom VHD in a storage account or directly from a generalized (via Sysprep) VM.

A snapshot applies only to one disk, whereas an image includes all disks attached to the VM. Using snapshots in scenarios that require the coordination of multiple disks, such as striping, is problematic because snapshots don't have awareness of any disk except the one that it contains.

Azure Disks offer a range of performance and capacity options to suit different workloads. Ultra Disks provide low sub-millisecond latencies and provisioned IOPS and throughput 99.99% of the time. They come in fixed sizes ranging from 4 GiB to 64 TiB.

You can adjust the performance of an Ultra Disk four times within a 24-hour period. Premium SSD v2 disks, on the other hand, offer sub-millisecond latencies and provisioned IOPS and throughput 99.9% of the time. You can individually set the capacity, throughput, and IOPS of a Premium SSD v2 disk based on your workload needs.

Ultra Disks support IOPS limits of 300 IOPS/GiB, up to a maximum of 400,000 IOPS per disk. Premium SSD v2 disks have a baseline IOPS of 3000 that is free of charge, increasing at a rate of 500 per GiB up to 80,000 IOPS.

Here's a comparison of the IOPS limits for Ultra Disks and Premium SSD v2 disks:

The Data Box Heavy device is a beast when it comes to storage capacity. It can handle up to 40 TB of data per order, with a usable capacity of around 35 TB.

The device has a weight of less than 2 pounds per box, making it easy to transport. Up to 5 disks can fit in the box, each with a storage capacity of 8 TB, or around 7 TB of usable space.

Data transfer is a breeze with the Data Box Heavy, thanks to its fast data transfer rate of up to 430 MBps. This is dependent on the file size, but it's still a significant improvement over other devices.

The device supports both software and hardware encryption, providing an extra layer of security for your data. Hardware encrypted disks use AES 256-bit encryption, while software encrypted disks use BitLocker AES 128-bit encryption.

Here are the specifications of the Data Box Heavy device:

Ultra Disks offer low sub-millisecond latencies and provisioned IOPS and throughput 99.99% of the time. They come in fixed sizes ranging from 4 GiB to 64 TiB.

Ultra Disks support IOPS limits of 300 IOPS/GiB, up to a maximum of 400,000 IOPS per disk. The minimum guaranteed IOPS per disk are 1 IOPS/GiB, with an overall baseline minimum of 100 IOPS.

You can adjust the performance of an Ultra Disk four times within a 24-hour period. After a performance resize operation has been issued on a disk, it can take up to an hour for the change to take effect.

Ultra Disks have a throughput limit of 256-kB/s for each provisioned IOPS, up to a maximum of 10,000 MB/s per disk. The minimum guaranteed throughput per disk is 4kB/s for each provisioned IOPS, with an overall baseline minimum of 1 MB/s.

Premium SSD v2 disks offer sub-millisecond latencies and provisioned IOPS and throughput 99.9% of the time. They allow you to individually set the capacity, throughput, and IOPS of a disk based on your workload needs.

All Premium SSD v2 disks have a baseline IOPS of 3000 that is free of charge. Increasing your IOPS beyond 3000 increases the price of your disk.

You can adjust the performance of a Premium SSD v2 disk four times within a 24-hour period, including the initial creation of the disk. After the first 24 hours, you can only adjust the performance up to three times.

Premium SSD v2 disks have a baseline throughput of 125 MB/s that is free of charge. Increasing your throughput beyond 125 MB/s increases the price of your disk.

Premium SSD v2 capacities range from 1 GiB to 64 TiBs, in 1-GiB increments. You're billed on a per GiB ratio, see the pricing page for details.

Ultra Disks offer up to 100 TiB per region per subscription by default, but support higher capacity by request.

The maximum capacity for Ultra Disks is 100 TiB per region per subscription by default, but can be increased by request.

You can request a higher capacity for Ultra Disks by requesting a quota increase or contacting Azure Support.

Here's a comparison of disk sizes and performance caps for Ultra Disks:

Premium SSD sizes range from 4 GiB to 32,767 GiB, with corresponding IOPS and throughput caps.

Here's a comparison of Premium SSD sizes:

Standard HDD sizes range from 32 GiB to 32,767 GiB, with corresponding IOPS and throughput caps.

Here's a comparison of Standard HDD sizes:

Azure disk limitations are a crucial aspect to consider when deciding which disk type to use for your virtual machines. Ultra disks, for example, can't be used as an OS disk.

Ultra disks also have limitations when it comes to availability sets, as they don't support them. This means you'll need to consider alternative options for high availability.

Some regions may not support Ultra disks due to the lack of availability zones, so it's essential to check the regions that support Ultra disks. Here are the regions where Ultra disks are available, along with their corresponding availability options:

It's also worth noting that not every VM size is available in every supported region with Ultra disks.

Ultra Disks have several limitations that you should be aware of. They can't be used as an OS disk.

Ultra Disks don't support availability sets, and existing disks can't be changed to Ultra Disks - they must be migrated. Encrypting Ultra Disks with customer-managed keys using Azure Key Vaults stored in a different Microsoft Entra ID tenant isn't currently supported.

Azure Disk Encryption isn't supported for VMs with Ultra Disks, but encryption at rest with platform-managed or customer-managed keys is. Ultra Disks also don't support Azure Site Recovery.

The following regions have Ultra Disk availability options:

Not every VM size is available in every supported region with Ultra Disks.

Ultra disks must be used as data disks and can only be created as empty disks.

You should use Premium solid-state drives (SSDs) as operating system (OS) disks.

Ultra disks are suited for data-intensive workloads such as SAP HANA, top-tier databases, and transaction-heavy workloads.

Ultra disks allow you to change the performance parameters without having to restart your virtual machines (VMs).

Premium SSD v2 offers higher performance than Premium SSDs and is generally less costly.

You can individually tweak the performance of Premium SSD v2 disks at any time to meet shifting performance needs.

Premium SSD v2 is suited for a broad range of workloads such as SQL server, Oracle, and big data/analytics.

Some applications, like Oracle Database, require a 512 byte sector size, which can be configured on Premium SSD v2 disks.

Oracle Database requires release 12.2 or later to support 4k native disks.

Standard bursting is a feature that offers better tolerance for unpredictable IO pattern changes. This makes it particularly beneficial for OS boot disks and applications prone to traffic spikes.

Standard SSDs provide disk bursting, which is designed to handle sudden increases in data transfer. This is especially useful for applications that experience frequent traffic spikes.

Disk bursting for Azure disks works in a way that allows for better performance during peak usage. This is achieved by temporarily increasing the disk's performance to meet the sudden demand.

To protect your Azure Disk, you can use Azure Backup, which supports disk sizes up to 32 tebibytes (TiB).

Azure Backup offers Azure Disk Backup as a native, cloud-based backup solution that helps protect your data in managed disks.

With Azure Disk Backup, you can configure protection for managed disks in just a few steps and automate snapshot lifecycle management.

Encryption is a crucial aspect of protecting your data, and Azure offers two types of encryption: server-side encryption and Azure Disk Encryption.

Server-side encryption is enabled by default for all managed disks, snapshots, and images in Azure, providing encryption at rest and safeguarding your data to meet organizational security and compliance commitments.

You can choose between platform-managed keys, where Azure manages your keys, and customer-managed keys, where you manage the keys yourself.

Azure Disk Encryption is available for both Windows and Linux VMs, using industry-standard BitLocker encryption technology and DM-Crypt technology, respectively. The encryption process is integrated with Azure Key Vault for key management.

Here are the key differences between server-side encryption and Azure Disk Encryption:

Azure Backup is a powerful tool that helps protect your data in case of regional disasters. It allows you to create a backup job with time-based backups and backup retention policies.

You can use Azure Backup to create snapshots of your managed disks, which are read-only, crash-consistent full copies of the disk. These snapshots exist independently of the source disk.

Azure Backup supports disk sizes up to 32 tebibytes (TiB), making it suitable for large-scale data protection.

To use Azure Disk Backup, you can configure protection for managed disks in just a few steps. This solution provides snapshot lifecycle management for managed disks, automating the periodic creation of snapshots and retaining them for a configured duration.

You can use snapshots to back up your managed disks at any point in time, and they are billed based on the used size. For example, if you create a snapshot of a managed disk with provisioned capacity of 64 GiB and an actual used data size of 10 GiB, that snapshot is billed only for the used data size of 10 GiB.

Azure disk offers high durability and availability, with a 99.999% uptime guarantee. This is achieved through the use of three replicas of your data, ensuring persistence even if one or two replicas experience problems.

Managed disks have consistently delivered high durability for IaaS disks, with a 0% annualized failure rate. Locally redundant storage (LRS) disks provide at least 99.999999999% (11 9's) of durability over a year, while zone-redundant storage (ZRS) disks provide at least 99.9999999999% (12 9's) of durability over a year.

Azure disk is integrated with availability sets to prevent a single point of failure. Disks are automatically placed in different storage scale units (stamps), so if one stamp fails, only the VM instances with disks on those stamps will fail.

For example, if you have an application running on five VMs in an availability set, the disks for those VMs won't all be stored in the same stamp. This means that if one stamp goes down, the other instances of the application will continue to run.

Azure disk billing is based on several factors, including disk type and size. You're billed according to the provisioned size of your managed disk, which is rounded up to the nearest offered disk size.

Managed disks are billed hourly, with prices prorated to the exact number of hours used. For example, if you provision an E10 disk and delete it after 20 hours, you're billed for the E10 offering prorated to 20 hours.

Snapshots are billed based on the size used, not the provisioned capacity. This means you're only charged for the actual data stored in the snapshot, not the full capacity of the disk.

Outbound data transfers incur billing for bandwidth usage, so be mindful of how much data you're moving out of Azure data centers.

Transactions are also billed, with each I/O operation counting as a single transaction on standard SSDs and HDDs. On standard SSDs, I/O operations larger than 256 kB of throughput are considered multiple transactions.

Here are the factors that affect managed disk billing:

For detailed pricing information, including transaction costs, check out the Managed Disks Pricing page.

You can create up to 50,000 VM disks of a type in a subscription per region by using managed disks.

Managed disks increase the scalability of virtual machine scale sets, allowing you to create up to 1,000 VMs in a single subscription.

Managed disks are integrated with availability sets to ensure that the disks of VMs in an availability set are sufficiently isolated from each other to avoid a single point of failure.

Disks are automatically placed in different storage scale units, also known as stamps. This means that if one stamp fails, only the VM instances with disks on those stamps will fail.

VM Deployment is a crucial step in the deployment process. With managed disks, you can create up to 50,000 VM disks of a type in a subscription per region.

This scalability is particularly useful when working with virtual machine scale sets. You can create up to 1,000 VMs in a virtual machine scale set by using an Azure Marketplace image or an Azure Compute Gallery image with managed disks.

This high VM count is a significant improvement over traditional deployment methods.

Availability Set Integration is a game-changer for ensuring high availability of your applications.

Disks are automatically placed in different storage scale units, known as stamps, to avoid a single point of failure.

This means that if one stamp fails, only the VM instances with disks on that stamp will fail, while the others continue to run.

For example, if you have an application running on five VMs in an availability set, the disks for those VMs won't be all stored in the same stamp.

This ensures that if one stamp goes down, the other instances of the application will keep running, minimizing downtime and ensuring high availability.

You can use Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) to assign specific permissions for a managed disk to one or more users. This allows you to grant access only to the operations that a person needs to perform a job.

For example, if you don't want a person to copy a managed disk to a storage account, don't grant access to the export action for that managed disk. You can also restrict access to sensitive operations like deleting a managed disk.

Private Link support for managed disks can help you restrict the export and import of managed disks so that it occurs only within your Azure virtual network. This ensures that your data travels only within the secure Microsoft backbone network.

Granular access control is a powerful tool that allows you to assign specific permissions to users for managed disks.

You can use Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) to grant access to only the operations that a person needs to perform a job.

For example, if you don't want a person to copy a managed disk to a storage account, don't grant access to the export action for that managed disk.

This level of control is especially useful when you want to limit a user's ability to delete a managed disk, as they can still retrieve a shared access signature (SAS) URI for the disk.

To further restrict access, you can also deny permission to use a SAS URI to copy a managed disk.

By granting access to only the necessary operations, you can ensure that users can perform their tasks without compromising the security of your managed disks.

For instance, if you want to allow a user to create snapshots of a virtual hard disk, you can grant them access to the relevant operations, such as read, write, and delete.

Private Link allows you to restrict the export and import of managed disks to only within your Azure virtual network.

This means that your data will travel only within the secure Microsoft backbone network, ensuring it stays safe and secure.

With Private Link, you can generate a time-bound SAS URI for unattached managed disks and snapshots, enabling you to export data to other regions for regional expansion, disaster recovery, and forensic analysis.

You can also use the SAS URI to directly upload a VHD to an empty disk from on-premises, giving you flexibility in how you manage your data.